1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for providing personalized information and services to individuals from a customer contact center.
2. Background
Businesses are able to offer goods and services to customers located world-wide through networks such as the Internet. As people become increasingly at ease with purchasing goods and services over the Internet, businesses have been able to expand and flourish. Customers are generally interested in quickly perusing the goods and services offered by a business operating on the Internet. Businesses that offer personalized service to customers have a competitive edge over other businesses because customers will generally be serviced more quickly and will be provided with higher quality of service.
Although there are a number of existing products that enable businesses to develop web sites that are able to provide personalized services to their customers, the levels of capability for a personalized service are different. Instead of creating a real integrated solution for personalized service, most existing personalization features are typically built around or tied together some original singularly designed solutions. For example, Net Perceptions offers a series of products that are built around its collaborative filtering technology. Net Perceptions applies this technology to a community behavior analysis based recommendation engine, a knowledge management system, and a campaign management system thereby providing one type of personalization service that may be used in an E-commerce system and a customer call center. However, the users of Net Perceptions system must integrate it with other content management systems to target pre-determined content based upon the recommendations that are generated. One disadvantage to Net Perceptions system is that it is unable to provide different service levels for content targeting. Additionally, the content flexibility and the variation of the content really depend on the external content management system. The knowledge management system provided by Net Perception cannot perform the function of a content management system.
A DYNAMO™ personalization service server by the Art Technology Group (ATG) offers another type of personalized service. The DYNAMO™ personalization server is adapted to manage both static and dynamic user attributes. This provides service content personalization while the customer is being served by a business on the Internet. To generate dynamic user attributes, ATG's DYNAMO™ personalization server uses a statistics based analysis mechanism. The analysis mechanism uses information collected while a user navigates the Internet. One disadvantage to ATG's DYNAMO™ personalization server is that the services are not differentiated for different service points (e.g., for web, voice, Email, system internal usage, etc.) Although DYNAMO™ personalization server enables service rules (e.g., rules that indicate which groups of service content should be provided to which groups of customers), these service rules are unable to differentiate the content for one customer at different service points. One reason is that ATG's DYNAMO™ personalization server depends upon an external content management system to provide service content.
Interact from Responsys.com is an e-mail-based outbound campaign service system that may support multi-media content. However, Interact is limited to a single service channel, i.e., Email, which does not support different content types for different service channels.
E.Piphany is yet another company that offers a personalized service product. E.Piphany's product provides real-time personalization service for customer call centers. The product may be used to define and deliver real-time marketing campaigns (e.g., advertising) through multiple customer touch points such as the phone, the web, an e-mail system, and facsimile. E.Piphany's product uses real-time analysis mechanisms that include a specialized real-time data mining techniques, collaborative filtering, and likelihood analysis. However, the product's personalization process, e.g., for campaigns and for recommendations, relates solely to different customer direct contact points after a customer contact point has been established. It does not contribute to the contact point selection and other system processes. Additionally, the product is not integrated with customer intrinsic information-based personalization service. Moreover, the product is not integrated with a content management system to differentiate different content types to different service points. It is therefore desirable to have a system that addresses the shortcomings associated with conventional systems.